New Delhi: The Centre will soon launch a dedicated web portal that will allow citizens to self-enumerate during the upcoming Census, making the facility available in both phases of the national enumeration exercise. Officials said on Monday that this will be India’s first fully digital Census: enumerators will collect data using mobile applications on Android and Apple devices, while the public will, for the first time, have the option to submit their own details online during the House-Listing and Housing Census as well as the Population Enumeration. Calling the initiative a transformational step toward modernising the process, officials noted that electronic transmission of data to a central server will enable faster availability of results, and that stringent safeguards will protect information during collection, transmission and storage. According to the schedule, the House-Listing operation will begin on April 1, 2026, followed by the Population Enumeration phase starting on February 1, 2027, during which the castes of household members will also be recorded. The reference date for most of the country will be 12 am on March 1, 2027, while Ladakh, Jammu and Kashmir, and the snow-bound non-synchronous areas of Himachal Pradesh and Uttarakhand will use 12 am on October 1, 2026. This will be the 16th Census overall and the eighth since Independence; a gazette notification was issued on June 16, 2025. To manage the massive exercise, the Registrar General of India has established a three-tier training system, national trainers, master trainers and field trainers, to prepare roughly 3.4 million enumerators and supervisors. States and Union Territories have been instructed to finalise any boundary changes to districts, tehsils and police-station limits by December 31, 2025, as Census rules require a three-month gap between “freezing” administrative units and the start of enumeration. In a letter to all states and UTs, Registrar General and Census Commissioner of India Mritunjay Kumar Narayan explained that villages and towns are divided into uniform enumeration blocks, with one enumerator assigned to each block to prevent omissions or duplication. House-listing preparations, including the appointment of supervisors and enumerators, will commence on April 1, 2026, and the population count will formally begin on February 1, 2027.
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